NewsWhip raises US$1.1m – plans to take on the Big Apple

Dublin-headquartered breaking news aggregator NewsWhip has raised US$1.1m in funding from a consortium of European and US investors.

The investors in this round include Hal Philipp of Meridian Growth Capital and Shane Naughton of Inundata, who both contributed to a previous angel round of investment for NewsWhip. They were joined by new incoming investors AIB Seed Capital Fund (managed by Dublin BIC), Enterprise Ireland, and angel investor and entrepreneur Hannes Smarason, former CEO of Icelandair, and CBO of deCODE.

The company, whose Spike technology is used by media professionals all over the world, plans to open a new office in New York City.

NewsWhip will also use the investment to continue to develop its Spike platform to keep newsrooms ahead of the curve on trending news and will be updating its main website, as well as its Android and iPhone apps.

Cutting through the noise

“With Spike, we’ve built a story-finding tool that makes life much easier every day for hundreds of journalists, editors, producers, and marketers,” said co-founder and CEO Paul Quigley.

“It cuts through the noise and serves the stories getting real engagement. That keeps our users ahead of the curve on both big news events and smaller niche content.

“We now have newsroom clients in 12 countries. Other Spike clients include freelancers, small publishers, agencies, and a few savvy brands focused on content marketing. Like newsrooms, brand marketers need to identify and work with quality stories – in particular, content that is driving engagement. That’s what we supply.”

NewsWhip’s New York office will open this month and the company has started hiring a New York-based sales and communications team.

“We’re delighted to welcome our new investors aboard the team” said co-founder and CTO Andrew Mullaney. “They include some extremely successful technology entrepreneurs, and we’ll welcome their advice on strategy, technology and market development.

“On the research and development side, we are now storing vast volumes of social data, and using it as a basis for research. For every piece of content published, we store hundreds of social data points and other metadata about its spread online. With this, we can map the genome of social distribution,” Mullaney said.